** spoiler alert ** I want to start off by saying that I actually like this series. The last few books have been great and I found myself getting more and more obsessed with it. Sadly however, Fade Out has failed to live up to my expectations. In fact, it is similiar to the first two books which I didn't exactly enjoy much.

The bad:

-Eve started to annoy me again. She seemed like a fangirl, gushing over Kim that the author gave us no reason at all to have positive feelings for. Eve also constantly runs her mouth off at Oliver and Michael unprovoked which I felt was unecessary and just straight off irritating.

-Pennywell was one of Bishop's main servants. He publicly fought against Amelie and her allies... and suddenly he appears as if nothing happened and working for Oliver. If Francois and Ysandre died or was jailed, why wasn't Pennywell given the same treatment?

-The events were messy and hard to keep up with again. The explanations of the sequences were not exactly thorough.

-There were again, many questions left unanswered. Or rather, things that happen out of the blue regardless of what has happened in the previous books. How did Kim get to know about Ada in the first place? Wasn't Ada supposed to be kept a secret? In Carpe Corpus, Shane handed Claire a black box at the end.. We never got to found out what that was.

-The scenes with the spiders were unecessary and felt like a rip off from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The scene where Ada grabbed Claire into the portal out of nowhere with Shane screaming Claire's name is almost identical to a few scenes in previous books. While I understand that sometimes this can occur, I think Rachel Caine should put more effort into writing out different scenes instead of focusing on Shane and Claire's kissing styles.

-WTF on Amelie dropping Claire's protection and changing her to a Neutral?! This might sound strange, but I kind of enjoyed Claire being under Amelie's wing and I felt that the gold bracelet served quite an important purpose.

The Good:

-OLIVER! I've been jumping onto his team since he and Amelie banded together to save the town. I love his guts and beyond that cool, arrogant and sometimes evil & sadistic character, we saw a hint of humanity in him this time and that to me is remarkable.

-Myrnin and Amelie. I'm sure most people feel the same way so I don't have to elaborate.

-Kim was the new antagonist in town and even I felt like hunting her down and ripping her hair out. Well played, Rachel Caine. Kim made Monica seem like a saint and to be honest, Monica has been quite.. nice lately.

-Ada is a real psycho but the underlying story that came with it was one of the great savers of the book. If Fade Out had just been about Morley and co, it might not have been as good.

Overall:

As usual, Rachel Caine presents us with witty and humorous dialogue together with characters that we grow emotionally attached to. Although there were a few surprising twists in Fade Out, the plot was still predictable and lackluster to me- it felt like a filler book in the series. However, I was glad to have my fill of Myrnin, Amelie and Oliver and that was enough to keep me going in this series.